virtual insanity cyber,
money, ego + art stephan greene -------------- You May Be an Anarchist
-And Not Even Know It By Derrick Jensen, insurgentdesire.org.uk interview
with Zerzan 2001 enemies of the state ------- The Iron Fist Behind the
Invisible Hand Kevin Carson (libertarian); see my comment in indy33.htm
--------------- virtual insanity cyber, money, ego + art Virtual Insanity,
the title of the 1996 hit-single by Jamiroquai, indicates nicely the perfidities
of the term ‘virtuality’. Either you are sick, you pretend to be sick or
you are trying to make yourself believe you are sick. And this is hypochondrism,
which is kind of 'really sick'. Similarly, you can say ‘cool virtuality’
rather than ‘virtual coolness’, since 'coolness' is a mode of being and
can only 'be or not be'. In reference to a title like ‘Cool Ecstasy’, it
is interesting to ask what kind of ‘ecstatic state’ are you expecting to
find. Maybe a rave club-event or a pill. But the thing that serves as ‘ecstasyfier’,
the thing you spent money on, the techno-rave or the dose of MDMA/XTC,
is - in some respect - a commodity fetish in the classical meaning of the
word. The reified promise, which is sufficient in its state of promise
and needs no fulfilling, no einlösung. This is what everybody knows:
advanced capitalism is a fireworks of packaging and displays, of distanced
self-critical operations of empty-promises, of the fun of being aware of
constructions. Questioning the promises of the commodity does not imply
its opposite: go for the Real thing, do battle with animals, or: do sex,
have sex, since everybody knows: sexuality is no guarantee for happiness
or ecstasy, but can be a rather complicated issue. The expression ‘have
sex’ is telling: there is no escape from fetishisms, even while performing
the ‘real’. buttons + rhetorics To click on the button labeled 'enter cyberspace/internet'
opens to a well known and quite homogeneous set of beliefs, images, tastes,
sentiments. Cyberspace or Virtual Reality are associated with movement,
'lightness', a strange category of bodily and bodyfree feelings, vague
sentiments of globalization, unlimited access and ability. It hints at
emancipation from restraints of class, tradition and matter ranging from
‘new democratic utopias’ to new spiritual citizenships. Its adherence to
the tradition of the enlightment/capitalistic-project is obvious. The button
'enter cyberspace' works as a rhetorical figure, organizing discourse,
destabilizing traditional structures in economical and social life, urging
companies all over the world to revamp their enterprises, changing learning-schedules
at schools and universities, etc. This figure as well come with preset-condition
of the ego, self-images. It enforces a transition from images of the human
subject of a rather sociological or psychoanalytical type (the individual
having a 'role' in society or as an ensemble of instincts) to a subject
whos selfreflexivity and mirror-reflection in the image of a pilot, navigating
through the night of the real/cyberspace, detached from bodily needs. This
rhetorical figure is ideological, in the foremost meaning of 'ideology'
as something that makes something else invisible. Cyberspace-talk is hiding
the actual transition in the economic field and in the status of the nation-state.
Fun, consumerism, flexible identities(deliberateness), technological reasoning,
low-cost-progress, access-for-all and internationalism are topics on the
agenda while the new cartographies of abandoned zones, the precarious nature
of work, new forms of computer-assisted-euthanasia for lowering costs are
not. It makes this development appear as a necessary and automatically
running process of differentiation in the means of production. The rhetoric
hides the agents of global and national capital who have forced governments
give up their political control over money and currency. Therefore money-deregulation
became the political answer to the crisis of Fordist production. But the
cyberspace-rhetoric has ideological implications insofar as it mingles
with the process of subject formation in capitalist societies. The french
philosopher louis althusser described ideology as that which is putting
subjects in the way they regard themselves: as individual, autonomuous,
unitary cells. Ideology makes 'you' act like a subject (+ you are). And
it treats you like that, as the proprietor of your property, including
all your capabilities and bodily appearances. ‘I’ plus ‘what I am’. This
ideological called into social being (interpellation) reappears in the
context of New Technologies. It is seen in theoretical debates on ‘techno
science’ stating an epochal shift in subjectivity: the digital image (and
the digital imagability) enters the inner core of the subject in formation
like a virus. The influential french psychoanalysist Jacques Lacan called
the mirror-phase the moment when the ‘becoming’ subject, the infant, realizes
its own distinctness from the world and its own individual wholeness through
seeing itself in the mirror – an alienating medium, or another person,
f.e. the mother. The 'techno-culture', in such a model, finds retrojected
the new technological devices as ersatz, a digitized phantasm (ghost) mirroring
the human appearances in a 'virtual' gestalt, yet paradoxically ready to
loose its identity and shape. Others, more critical towards the emerging
new technologies, like the us-literary theorist Rowitha Müller, detect
here rather a dramatization of absence and schein. production of subjectivity
The production of subjectivity is at the heart of the New Technologies.
It takes this position for philosophical reasons but also insofar as it
is part of new consumption strategies in a society that produces less through
material production than through services and leisure-time-gadgets. „Work
isn’t working" heralds British Telecom in large advertisement-panels. It
was British Telecom who were the first in tradition-bound Europe to be
privatized and go public on the stock-market. Deutsche Telekom followed
and started a pretentious show of making money out of money investing in
the brilliant future of New Technologies. This happened in 1997 when official
german politics started to acknowledge globalisation and the deregulation
of social policy as the necessary doctrine for the coming decade. When
everyone in the society is urged to go private or become corporate, to
give up ideas of collective worker unions and is forced to feel the pressure
of economical survival without health care as we know it all comes together
to determine a new spirit of being-for-oneself. The new stockholder offers
from television stations like Pro7 go that way. Make the users identify
themselves with their programm.. soft is --concerning 'ware'-- not soft
enough for the real virtual What actually is Virtual Reality and what does
it have in common with the internet? The answer is more complicated than
it seems. While the internet is an easy thing to refer to --the online-data-telephone-complexion
that everybody knows-- Virtual Reality is not. The internet is communication
that creeps through a kind of 'space', what type of space is that? To name
it cyberspace would not be totally on target, because there it does not
take much computing of space in building up that mediatic something that
enables connection. Considering the MUDs and MOOs, where actors are consensually
join to meet in medieval huts, imaginary streets, and certainly to online-rooms
to meet, the case is quite different: the 'space' here is verbal and to
a certain extent imaginary, but still not very 'cyber', i.e., there is
not much cybernetic technology involved. The MUD, the room, where the 'action',
the conversation takes place, is virtual. Nevertheless, this is as virtual
as any boardgame like Monopoly. The actors are necessary, even if some
bots are involved. But, the final consideration is to imagine a game where
only ‘bots’ are playing with one another. This is like the other side of
the moon, like rocks rolling down hills and nobody watching or caring.
Beyond the contradictory and deeply ideological fixing of these terms in
a techno-cultural normality, there appears yet still something else to
be identified. "At the end of the 20th century comes about the long prophecized
convergency of the media, the computer and telecommunication to a hypermedium.
Once more the untireable longing of capitalism to diversify and to intensify
the creative potentials of man is into changing qualitatively the ways
we work, play and live together. Via the integration of different technologies
through common protocols there is something being produced that is more
than the sum of its parts". This is an excerpt from an text by Richard
Barbrook and Andy Cameron called "The Californean Ideology". It has been
widely acknowledged for its criticality towards the community of "computer-enthusiasts,
lazy students, innovating capitalists, engaged politicians, fancy academics,
futuristic bureaucrats, and opportunistic politicians" from within the
net-community. Barbrook and Cameron trace the contradictionary nature of
the new alliance that unifies hippies with capitalists, emancipatory leftists
with old-school reactionaries. How can it happen, they ask, that the new
ideology brings westcoast drugusers to have the same goals as Ronald Reagan
who had them beaten up when he ordered the police in may 1969 to control
and suppress protesting hippies. "Who could have seen, that such a contradictory
mixture of technological determinism and liberal individualism would become
the hybrid orthodoxy of the information age." undeliberate actors To enter
cyberspace is therefore a political act - even if you are just playing.
That doesn't mean that play in cyberspace should be politicized, but it
means that the assumptions and alleged promises which are reproduced in
mainstream- and critical discourse have their serious side. All the internet-verbal-amplifiers
(press and public relations as well as crticians as ...) like wired-magazine
are political actors who are part of a struggle to make the indispensability
of virtual reality a process of tautological quality (new techology as
the new paradigm because they are) or just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Certain segments of the art world were, if decisively not avantgarde, still
sufficiently ahead of the public in discovering the techniology as the
'new' esthetical paradigm to reestablish a myth of the avantgarde, albeit
in its techno-cultural version. Artists and Curators became active in the
most diverse levels of cultural productions. Peter Weibel’s arts and science
shows in Linz as well as Jeffrey Deitch’s exhibition Posthuman are prominet
examples. Sometimes incredible naive, like Weibel’s "artificial....", which
gave genetic engineering total credit for being able to solve every remaining
problem on earth (which are allegedly, to enforce the necessity, outrageously
many) or impertinent like Deitch, who subsumes all emancipatory forces
of discussions on gender and race under the project of the New Technologies.
All of these projects go forward based on the premise that Biotechnics
make the total construction of reality (including differences of gender
and race), which cultural studies analyzed, de facto and materially true.
This discourse is ridiculously void of any insight into the real state
of medical arts. As astonishing as cloned animals and flys with artificial
eyes on each of its limbs might be, they are effects of trial- and error-experiments
and not the result of an easy ‘steering’ of life. But the discourse of
bio-techno-emancipation is naive in not realizing the stigmatizing character
of techno-determinism: the allegedly ‘bad’ gene is no better as stigma
as the skin or the eyes’ colour. Biotechnics, in the mainframe of computer-aided-weltbild
like gene-code etc and the naiveté of believing that everything
science predicted (as if ancient beliefs were less convincing in their
times, for example the notion that matter-energy-transformations make spaceflight
possible) and not seeing that the plausibility of the gene-code-paradigm
is restricted, might help explain things and most others not - something
that the aids-research shows nachdrücklich. flexible agents The art-world
models the new demands for the new urban work-force: social beings, acting
on their own account, reflexively stylish, nondetermined social identity,
and working in all categories at hand. The plausibility of techno-culture
is far more esthetically mediated than it is scientific. It has been fabricated
through an alliance of consumer-gadgets, the look of trashy detachment,
new strategies in advertisements, and commodity-like phantasm of subject-formations.
change, labeled: change (globalization) The claim that the internet-talk
hides the transition in the economic field is not evident, since internet-culture
is about the transition of an era of material production into the so called
information age. But the term ‘information age’ with its pseudo-logical
appendix of a ‘friction free capitalism’ (bill gates) is radically misleading.
While the extent of material production has been lowered (for example Volkswagen
makes more than 50 percent of its profit from finance deals) it is still
indispensable. Saskia Sassen asks rhetorically "why do they bother to make
cars as they make no profit on the cars?" . The answers: "well, the production
of the cars is a mechanism for concentrating a vast amount of money in
a time-frame of nine-months where you can use it only on a daily basis
in your financial division and make money. This has created an enourmous
distortion. I mentioned the case of manufacturing, because financial capital
is, yes, to a large extent, self-referential. It has invented circuits
for its own circulation, which are fairly autonomous from the rest of economic
systems. However, manufacturing matters, not just because we are still
consuming, no matter how digitized --we all need Bekleidung, we all need
cars and tables-- but because manufacturing is one mechanism for bringing
in enourmous liquidity into the system." (sassen, 3. hilfe) money The status
of money, even from a strictly economical point of view, has not conceptually
worked out. This fairly undebated point of blindness might be surprising
regarding money’s centrality in economic proceedings, but it is less astonishing
with regarding to the classics of economic theory like Adam Smith and Ricardo.
There the marketplace and its logic of change are a apriori. In their effort
to make exchange more effective and convenient, two parties come together
and make use of a mediating device through a wertaufbewahrungsmittel. This
might be a contract, a 'future' guaranting the return of the received value
to a given time or 'the coin'. In this case money was only a supplement,
neutral, without any specificity beyond the logic of the market. Marx didn't
go much further on this point, claiming money to be a fetish. But the notion
of the fetish remained rather restricted. The fetish deceives concerning
the status of value. Money hides the bond between value and human labour,
and, in capitalistic societies, this is exploitation. To make the long
story of money’s agency in capitalism short: What, if money could be invented,
if it could be privaticed, if it is an object of governmental steering
or marketplace deregulations like any other commodity? The conservative
neo-monetarian F.A. von Hayek claimed: "Money does not have to be created
legal tender by government: like law, language and morals it can emerge
spontaneously. Such private money has often been preferred to governmental
money, but government has usually suppressed it" (Hayek, Friedrich August
von, 1978, Denationalisation of Money - The Argument Redefined, Institute
of Economic Affairs, Washington D.C.). Can the wertaufbewahrungsmittel
engender value by inventing or creating money? In the first place this
seems a contradiction: as you can't have 'gedankengeld' (Sohn-Rethel),
mental money, since intersubjectivity is money’s precondition (any doubts
in its guarantee causes the banking system to collaps as it did in Europe
in 1932), you cannot have more money than purchaseable, because this causes
inflation whereby money is devalued; inflation occurs until money and goods
are equal again. The postwar years in the West were deeply structured by
a keynesian state-apparatus, that not only governed the quantity of money-circulation,
but subsidized the private sector by spending large amounts of public money
there(‘deficit spending’). Schools, hospitals, universities, infra-structure,
the military apparatus, research and development are receiving large influxes
of governmental capital. To such an extent, that the german economist Elmar
Altvater describes it thus: "Public debt is the wealth of the society".
But the actual battle around the status of money is difficult to analyse,
if possible at all. While neomonetarian positions become stronger, the
European Union is deeply involved in a discussion about the regulation
and workings of money. The Bundesbank is feared by all of Europe because
of its strong position against the loosening ist tightholds on an extremely
low-credit policy and ist fixed deflation, while on the other hand the
trend of all European states to now lower their debt signals the end of
keynesian politics, of subsidizing the private sector. money-aided-ME-design
Under given conditions the individual subject finds itself inmeshed in
a net of money matters. Housing, life-style, food-consumption, ennui, excitement,
satisfaction, affection, self-esteem are all shaped by financial conditions.
The individual household is not only connected to a flow of earned or credited
money on Christmas. The change in governmental politics concerning welfare
and deregulations of employment-restraints is increasing the 'stress',
that households undergo by sustaining their survival. The decreasing area
of production makes the area of reproduction more important; but reproduction
not of workers, but of consumers.The postfordistic production is even more
forced to let consumtion happen on a large scale and to go for 'revolutionary'
speed in renewing the consumtion goods by help of sophisticated design.
The gebrauchswertversprechen, the esthetics of commodities, a notion invented
by postmarxists in the 70s, became the core of production. That makes corporations
like Nike or Coca Cola economically gigantic. But while the use of a Coca
is easy, the use of its Gebrauchswertversprechen, its esthetics, has to
be learned. 'Learned' concerning the work that is necessary to stay updated
in reklame-reception, and 'learned' concerning the individual fetishistic
economy of promise, optionality, ersatz. The amount of work that has been
done on behalf of young, independent cultural producers to develop a techno-culture
is enormous and cannot be gauged economically. Surely, that was emancipatory
work, aneignung, and made people feel good. That is true and it is not
true. Laura Mulvey developes in "Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism
in the Context of Contemporary Culture" a connection between Marx understanding
of fetishism and Freud’s. First of all there is the difference: on the
one hand a lack of inscription of the working process on the commodity's
surface and on the other hand Freud, for whom "the fetish object acts as
a 'sign' in that it substitutes for the thing thought to be missing" (p11).
"There is nothing intrinsically fetishistic, as it were, about the commodity
in Marx's theory", argues Mulvey. Maybe Marx himself failed to explain
why a lack of inscription alone made it possible to give the commodity
something 'magic', which he himself felt urged to compare with the religious
experience. Marx contained himself to explain this psychic 'surplus' with
the false anschein of commodities autonomy or the 'life', the commodities
seem to contain. This would seem to make Freud necessary for Marx to make
some of its implications explainable. What kind of subjects have been produced,
that feel sufficiently attracted to go on staring at ersatz-objects of
fetishistic sheen, the 'rich sight' (mulvey), the breathing of protoorgiastic
exchange, the abstracts of touch, experience, 'beware of your body's sensitivity'
on a mediated tape, which are the media in general. In the height days
of Hollywood cinema, the dark hole of the movies theatre was the space
to feel nourished by a feeding of "beauty that covers lack", of deeds executed
by doers on objects of passive gratitude, i.e. a space for somebody, being
on the hook of ersatz, on what the ersatz is about: life. The viewer does
not necessarily believe in what he sees. It is enough just to act as if.
This is exactly the way Althusser defined ideology. Christian Metz conclusion
on, who is the one to believe, is interesting not only in analyzing the
cinematic apparatus, but to a further explanation of the nature of ideologies
impact: "In other words (..) since it is 'accepted' that the audience is
incredulous, who is it who is credulous? (..) This credulous person is,
of course, another part of ourselves." (Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier:
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, London, Macmillan, 1982, p.72). This fragment
of a person, this alien gadget of subjectivity, can be traced through an
array of different theories. Maybe it has to do with the idealist cogito,
that Adorno extracted out of the commodity fetish as ‘falsches bewusstsein’
or what Alfred Sohn-Rethel made clear to be an effect of the praxis of
money: the Transzendentalsubjekt. Or finding it with Pierre Klossowskis
concept in his forgotten book "La Monnaie Vivante" (the living money).
Klossowskis cryptic but extremly interesting book starts with the conception
of "le suppot", the carrier, screen, surface of personal identity. This
screen is not due to outer zuschreibungen, but is due to the effect of
a rejection of pulsive motives. But these pulsions are part of commodity
movement, as a source of exploitation, as an extention of what Marx saw
as "ursprüngliche Akkumulation". And what happens, when the money-function
is not situated any more in the coin, but in what is all consumtion is
about, i.e. the feeling that it can auslösen? Money comes close to
its own paradoxical core: that it is the real thing on the real media:
the empfindung. Klossowskis book is a mise en scene of thinking (michel
foucaults „theatrum philosophicum") rather than a theoretical approach.
But it reveals a certain insuffiency of the conceptualization of the consumer
society as we know it. It is neither a rational process nor a management
of work and financial options alone. Because there must be something before
to be exploited, to be adressed, to be shaped, to be moved. This is certainly
not life in its unalienated state, and it is nothing to be alienated (which
setzt voraus anything unalienated, real, pure etc). But still life as the
einsatz acts a precondition, or, psychoanalytical speaking, motivation
or longing. This is pumped up with fetishism. Because the deepest longing
is not any experience, not genuss, since this is timely, but to possess
motivation. And this is exactly what the screen is able to be nourished
with. When the big V of virtual: space, money, life, sex -- finds itself
opposed to life (how parts of the techno-establishment are still dealing
with) than because it exchanges change: -------------------------------
You May Be an Anarchist -And Not Even Know It By Derrick Jensen, The
Sun May 15, 2001 After the anti-corporate globalization protests in
Seattle took the world by surprise a year and a half ago, a number of mainstream
journalists looked to a soft-spoken anarchist theorist from Eugene, Oregon,
for answers.Indeed, John Zerzan, whose ideas were very influential with
some of theyoung protesters, can now credibly claim the decidedly dubious
honor of being America's most famous anarchist. All the attention has done
nothing to soften Zerzan's view that modern society has subjugated the
populace to the point that it no longer even sees the bars of its cage.
In this interview, the 57-year-old radical explores the roots of domination,
the subtle coercion of the clock, and his hope for a future without progress.
Now that the mainstream media have discovered anarchism, there seems to
be more and more confusion about what it means. How do you define it? I
would say anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination.
This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its
routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with
its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms
as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Beyond that, anarchism is the attempt
to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens,
as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate
our domination of others. ---::--- But has a condition ever existed in
which relations have not been based on domination? ---::--- That was the
human condition for at least 99 percent of our existence as a species,
from before the emergence of Homo sapiens, at least a couple of million
years ago, until perhaps only 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of first
agriculture and then civilization. Since that time we have worked very
hard to convince ourselves that no such condition ever existed, because
if no such condition ever existed, it's futile to work toward it now. We
may as well then accept the repression and subjugation that define our
way of living as necessary antidotes to "evil human nature." After all,
according to this line of thought, our pre-civilized existence of deprivation,
brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent gift that rescued
us from savagery. Think about the images that come to mind when you mention
the labels "cave man" or "Neanderthal." Those images are implanted and
then invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government,
and toil, and are probably the biggest ideological justifications for the
whole van of civilization, armies, religion, law, the state. The problem
with those images, of course, is that they are entirely wrong. There has
been a potent revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology
over the past 20 years, and increasingly people are coming to understand
that life before agriculture and domestication, in which by domesticating
others we domesticated ourselves, was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy
with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. ---::--- How
do we know this? ---::--- In part through observing modern foraging peoples,
what few we've not yet eliminated, and watching their egalitarian ways
disappear under the pressures of habitat destruction and oftentimes direct
coercion or murder. Also, at the other end of the time scale, through interpreting
archaeological digs. An example of this has to do with the sharing that
is now understood to be a keynote trait of non-domesticated people. If
you were to study hearth sites of ancient peoples, and to find that one
fire site has the remains of all the goodies, while other sites have very
few, then that site would probably be the chief's. But if time after time
you see that all the sites have about the same amount of stuff, what begins
to emerge is a picture of a people whose way of life is based on sharing.
And that's what is consistently found in preneolithic sites. A third way
of knowing is based on the accounts of early European explorers, who again
and again spoke of the generosity and gentleness of the peoples they encountered.
This is true all across the globe. ---::--- How do you respond to people
who say this is all just nutty Rousseauvian noble savage nonsense? ---::---
I respectfully suggest they read more within the field. This isn't anarchist
theory. It's mainstream anthropology and archaeology. There are disagreements
about some of the details, but not about the general structure. ---::---
If things were so great before, why did agriculture begin? ---::--- That's
a very difficult question, because for so many hundreds of thousands of
years there was very little change. That's long been a source of frustration
to scholars in anthropology and archaeology: How could there have been
almost zero change for hundreds of thousands of years, the whole lower
and middle Paleolithic Eraand then suddenly at a certain point in the upper
Paleolithic there's this explosion, seemingly out of nowhere? You suddenly
have art, and on the heels of that, agriculture. I think it was stable
because it worked, and I think it changed finally because for many millennia
there was a kind of slow slippage into division of labor. This happened
so slowly, almost imperceptibly, that people didn't see what was happening,
or what they were in danger of losing. The alienation brought about by
division of labor, alienation from each other, from the natural world,
from their bodies, then reached some sort of critical mass, giving rise
to its apotheosis in what we've come to know as civilization. As to how
civilization itself took hold, I think Freud nailed that one when he said
that "civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority
by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of
power and coercion." That's what we see happening today, and there's no
reason to believe it was any different in the first place. ---::--- What's
wrong with division of labor? ---::--- If your primary goal is mass production,
nothing at all. It's central to our way of life. Each person performs as
a tiny cog in this big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal
is relative wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, or an intact world, there's
quite a lot wrong with it. I think that at base a person is not complete
or free insofar as that person's life and the whole surrounding setup depend
on his or her being just some aspect of a process, some fraction of it.
A divided life mirrors the basic divisions in society and it all starts
there. Hierarchy and alienation start there, for example. I don't think
anyone would deny the effective control that specialists and experts have
in the contemporary world. And I don't think anyone would argue that control
isn't increasing with ever-greater acceleration. ---::--- But humans are
social animals. Isn't it necessary for us to rely on each other? ---::---
It's important to understand the difference between the interdependence
of a functioning community and a form of dependence that comes from relying
on others who have specialized skills you don't have. They now have power
over you. Whether they are "benevolent" in using it is really beside the
point. In addition to direct control by those who have specialized skills,
there is a lot of mystification of those skills. Part of the ideology of
modern society is that without it, you'd be completely lost, you wouldn't
know how to do the simplest thing. Well, humans have been feeding themselves
for the past couple of million years, and doing it a lot more successfully
and efficiently than we do now. The global food system is insane. It's
amazingly inhumane and inefficient. We waste the world with pesticides,
herbicides, the effects of fossil fuels to transport and store foods, and
so on, and literally millions of people go their entire lives without ever
having enough to eat. But few things are simpler than growing or gathering
your own food. ---::--- You've said that we've also come to be dominated
by time itself. ---::--- Time is an invention, a cultural artifact, a formation
of culture. It has no existence outside culture. And it's a pretty exact
measure of alienation. ---::--- How so? ---::--- Everything in our lives
is measured and ruled by time, even dreams, as we force them to conform
to a workaday world of alarm clocks and schedules. It's really amazing
when you think that it wasn't that long ago that time wasn't so disembodied,
so abstract. But wait a second. Isn't the tick, tick, tick of a clock about
as tangible as you can get? I really like what anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl
wrote about this: "Our idea of time seems to be a natural attribute of
the human mind. But that is a delusion. Such an idea scarcely exists where
primitive mentality is concerned." ---::--- Which means? ---::--- Most
simply, that they live in the present, as we all do when we're having fun.
It has been said that the Mbuti of southern Africa believe that "by a correct
fulfillment of the present, the past and the future will take care of themselves."
---::--- What a concept! ---::--- Primitive peoples generally have no interest
in birthdays or measuring their ages. As for the future, they have little
desire to control what does not yet exist, just as they have little desire
to control nature. That moment-by-moment joining with the flux and flow
of the natural world, of course, doesn't preclude an awareness of the seasons,
but this in no way constitutes an alienated time consciousness that robs
them of the present. What I'm talking about is hard for us to wrap our
minds around because the notion of time has been so deeply inculcated that
it's sometimes hard to imagine it not existing. ---::--- You're not talking
about just not measuring seconds . . . ---::--- I'm talking about time
not existing. Time, as an abstract continuing "thread" that unravels in
an endless progression that links all events together while remaining independent
of them. That doesn't exist. Sequence exists. Rhythm exists. But not time.
Part of this has to do with the notion of mass production and division
of labor. Tick, tick, tick, as you said. Identical seconds. Identical people.
Identical chores repeated endlessly. Well, no two occurrences are identical,
and if you are living in a stream of inner and outer experience that constantly
brings clusters of new events, each moment is quantitatively and qualitatively
different from the moment before. The notion of time simply disappears.
---::--- I'm still confused. ---::--- You might try this: If events are
always novel, then not only would routine be impossible, but the notion
of time would be meaningless. ---::--- And the opposite would be true as
well. ---::--- Exactly. Only with the imposition of time can we begin to
impose routine. The 14th century saw the first public clocks, and also
the division of hours into minutes and minutes into seconds. The increments
of time were now as fully interchangeable as the standardized parts and
work processes necessary for capitalism. At every step of the way this
subservience to time has been met with resistance. For example, in early
fighting in France's July Revolution of 1830, all across Paris people began
to spontaneously shoot at public clocks. In the 1960s, many people, including
me, quit wearing watches. For a while in my 20s, I asked visitors to take
off their watches as they entered my home. Even today children must be
broken of their resistance to time. This was one of the primary reasons
for the imposition of this country's mandatory school system on a largely
unwilling public. School teaches you to be at a certain place at a certain
time, and prepares you for life in a factory. It calibrates you to the
system. French situationist Raoul Vaneigem has a wonderful quote about
this: "The child's days escape adult time; their time is swollen by subjectivity,
passion, dreams haunted by reality. Outside, the educators look on, waiting,
watch in hand, till the child joins and fits the cycle of the hours." Time
is important not only sociologically and ecologically, but also personally.
If I can share another quote, it would be [Austrian philosopher Ludwig]
Wittgenstein's "Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is
happy." Just last year I came across an account by the 18th-century explorer
Samual Hearne, the first white man to explore northern Canada. He described
Indian children playing with wolf pups. The children would paint the pups'
faces with vermilion or red ochre, and when they were done playing with
them return them unhurt to the den. Neither the pups nor the pups' parents
seemed to mind at all. Now we gun them down from airplanes. That's progress
for you. ---::--- More broadly, what has progress meant in practice? ---::---
Progress has meant the looming specter of the complete dehumanization of
the individual and the catastrophe of ecological collapse. I think there
are fewer people who believe in progress now than ever, but probably there
are still many who perceive it as inevitable. We're certainly conditioned
on all sides to accept that, and we're held hostage to it. ---::--- If
fewer people believe in progress, what has replaced it? ---::--- Inertia.
This is it. Deal with it, or else get screwed. You don't hear so much now
about the American Dream, or the glorious new tomorrow. Now it's a global
race for the bottom as transnational corporations compete to see which
can most exploit workers, most degrade the environment. That competition
thing works on the personal level, too. If you don't plug into computers
you won't get a job. That's progress. ---::--- Where does that leave us?
---::--- I'm optimistic, because never before has our whole lifestyle been
revealed as much for what it is. ---::--- Now that we've seen it, what
is there to do? ---::--- The first thing is to question it, to make certain
that part of the discourse of society, if not all of it, deals with these
life-and-death issues, instead of the avoidance and denial that characterizes
so much of what passes for discourse. And I believe, once again, that this
denial can't hold up much longer, because there's such a jarring contrast
between reality and what is said about reality. Especially in this country,
I would say. Maybe, and this is the nightmare scenario, that contrast can
go on forever. The Unabomber Manifesto posits that possibility: People
could just be so conditioned that they won't even notice there's no natural
world anymore, no freedom, no fulfillment, no nothing. You just take your
Prozac every day, limp along dyspeptic and neurotic, and figure that's
all there is. ---::--- So, how do you see the future playing out? ---::---
I was talking to a friend about it this afternoon, and he was giving reasons
why there isn't going to be a good outcome, or even an opening toward a
good outcome. I couldn't say he was wrong, but as I mentioned before, I'm
kind of betting that the demonstrable impoverishment on every level goads
people into the kind of questioning we're talking about, and toward mustering
the will to confront it. Perhaps now we're in the dark before the dawn.
I remember when [social critic Herbert] Marcuse wrote One-Dimensional Man.
It came out in about 1964, and he was saying that humans are so manipulated
in modern consumerist society that there really can be no hope for change.
And then within a couple of years things got pretty interesting, people
woke up from the '50s to create the movements of the '60s. I believe had
he written this book a little later it would have been much more positive.
Perhaps the '60s helped shape my own optimism. I was at the almost perfect
age. I was at Stanford in college, and then I moved to Haight Ashbury,
and Berkeley was across the Bay. I got into some interesting situations
just because I was in the right place at the right time. I agree with people
who say the '60s didn't even scratch the surface, but you have to admit
there was something going on. And you could get a glimpse, a sense of possibility,
a sense of hope, that if things kept going, there was a chance of us finding
a different path. We didn't, but I still carry that possibility, and it
warms me, even though 30 years later things are frozen, and awful. Sometimes
I'm amazed that younger people can do anything, or have any hope, because
I'm not sure they've seen any challenge that has succeeded even partially.
---::--- What do you want from your work and your life? ---::--- I would
like to see a face-to-face community, an intimate existence, where relations
are not based on power, and thus not on division of labor. I would like
to see an intact natural world and I would like to live as a fully human
being. I would like that for the people around me. ---::--- Once again,
how do we get there from here? ---::--- I have no idea. It might be something
as simple as everybody just staying home from work. Fuck it. Withdraw your
energy. The system can't last with-out us. It needs to suck our energy.
If people stop responding to the system, it's doomed. ---::--- But if we
stop responding, if we really decide not to go along, aren't we doomed
also, because the system will destroy us? ---::--- Right. It's not so easy.
If it were that simple, people would just stay home, because it's such
a drag to go through these miserable routines in an increasingly empty
culture. But a question we always have to keep in mind is this: We're doomed,
but in which way are we more doomed? I recently gave a talk at the University
of Oregon in which I spoke on a lot of these topics. Near the end I said,
"I know that a call for this sort of overturning of the system sounds ridiculous,
but the only thing I can think of that's even more ridiculous is to just
let the system keep on going." ---::--- How do we know that all the alienation
we see around us will lead to breakdown and rejuvenation? Why can't it
just lead to more alienation?. ---::--- It's a question of how reversible
the damage is. Sometimes, and I don't believe this is too much avoidance
or denial, sometimes in history things are reversed in a moment when the
physical world intrudes enough to knock us off balance. [Raoul] Vaneigem
refers to a lovely little thing that gives me tremendous hope. The dogs
in Pavlov's laboratory had been conditioned for hundreds of hours. They
were fully trained and domesticated. Then there was a flood in the basement.
And you know what happened? They forgot all of their training in the blink
of an eye. We should be able to do at least that well. I am staking my
life on it, and it is toward this end that I devote my work. Derrick Jensen
is the author of A Language Older than Words (Context Books, 2000). From
Alternative Press Review (Spring 2000). Subscriptions: $16/yr. (4 issues)
from Box 4710, Arlington, VA 22204-4710. This interview originally appeared
in The Sun, subscriptions: $34/yr. (12 issues) from Box 3000, Denville,
NJ 07834. HOME --------------------------- The Iron Fist Behind
the Invisible Hand Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guaranteed System
of Privilege INTRODUCTION Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have
been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself
by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their
lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been
created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act
of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present
by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without
which its survival is unimaginable. The current structure of capital ownership
and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects
coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From
the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire"
was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation,
guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline. Most such intervention
is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market"
system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess
were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism,
the Chicago school and Randoids take existing property relations and class
power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system
minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century
robber baron capitalism. But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian
left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism--a
system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could
not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that
expropriation of surplus value--i.e., capitalism--cannot occur without
state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist.
It was for this reason that the free market mutualist Benjamin Tucker--from
whom right-libertarians selectively borrow--regarded himself as a libertarian
socialist. It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world
where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention.
A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely
distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks,
productive technology was freely available in every country without patents,
and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery,
is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized,
small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who
did the work--as different from our world as day from night, or freedom
from slavery. THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy
to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital
was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access
to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms.
The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate
organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power
and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.
For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all
for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists
commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation." "What the capitalist
system demanded was... a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass
of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their
means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which
the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself." [Marx,
"Chapter 27: The Expropriation," Capital vol. 1] To grasp the enormity
of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under
the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from
conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were
descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any
standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word.
The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had
compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land. J. L.
and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field
system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times,
with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights
as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their
own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural
community was "taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which
a dictator reconstructs a free government." [The Village Labourer 27-28,
35-36]. When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility,
the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their
holdings into one." [Marx, "The Expropriation"]. This stolen land, about
a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation
of the peasantry. Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform"
of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy
abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until
then "only a feudal title," into "rights of modern private property." In
the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders
were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible
quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In
substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since
it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under
the "reform," tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be
evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit [Marx, "The Expropriation..."].
Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased
drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in
which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property
as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures
before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England
[Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures
between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter
of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste
into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27]. The ruling classes saw the
peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist
and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a
dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor
on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described
the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous
race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the
lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The
Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer
"possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings"
meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work."
[Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir
Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors
into "a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others."
There would, "perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion
to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."]. Marx cited parliamentary "acts
of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private
property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal
lords," actually required "a parliamentary coup d'etat... for its transformation
into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive
accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author: these
new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after
they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the
guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the
history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind
in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,"
Capital Vol. 1]. Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless.
The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange
on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation
of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled
the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era
Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer,"
Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry."
["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor
man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his
life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements
[Wealth of Nations 61]. The state maintained work discipline by keeping
laborers from voting with their feet. It was hard to persuade parish authorities
to grant a man a certificate entitling him to move to another parish to
seek work. Workers were forced to stay put and bargain for work in a buyer's
market [Smith 60-61]. At first glance this would seem to be inconvenient
for parishes with a labor shortage [Smith 60]. Factories were built at
sources of water power, generally removed from centers of population. Thousands
of workers were needed to be imported from far away. But the state saved
the day by setting itself up as a middleman in providing labor-poor parishes
with cheap surplus labor from elsewhere, depriving workers of the ability
to bargain for better terms. A considerable trade arose in child laborers
who were in no position to bargain in any case [the Hammonds, The Town
Labourer 1:146]. Relief "was seldom bestowed without the parish claiming
the exclusive right of disposing, at their pleasure, of all the children
of the person receiving relief," in the words of the Committee on Parish
Apprentices, 1815 [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:44, 147]. Even when Poor
Law commissioners encouraged migration to labor-poor parishes, they discouraged
adult men and "Preference was given to 'widows with large families of children
or handicraftsmen... with large families.'" In addition, the availability
of cheap labor from the poor-law commissioners was deliberately used to
drive down wages; farmers would discharge their own day-laborers and instead
apply to the overseer for help [Thompson 223-224]. Although the Combination
Laws theoretically applied to masters as well as workmen, in practice they
were not enforced against the latter [Smith 61; the Hammonds, Town Labourer
1:74]. "A Journeyman Cotton Spinner"--a pamphleteer quoted by E. P. Thompson
[pp. 199-202]--described "an abominable combination existing amongst the
masters," in which workers who had left their masters because of disagreement
over wages were effectively blacklisted. The Combination Laws required
suspects to answer interrogations on oath, empowered magistrates to give
summary judgment, and allowed summary forfeiture of funds accumulated to
aid the families of strikers [Town Labourer 123-127]. And the laws setting
maximum rates of pay amounted to a state enforced system of combination
for the masters. As Adam Smith put it, "[w]henever the legislature attempts
to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its
counsellors are always the masters." [p. 61]. The working class lifestyle
under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical
break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own
work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced
by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting
and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of
saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And
the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological
rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat
down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common
land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work
on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable
degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint. In the modern world
most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to
observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders,
but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal
rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that
the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist
of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever
allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings
when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep
as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for
fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering
the airless and laughterless life of a prison [the Hammonds, Town Labourer
1:33-34]. The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without
first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any
source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense
of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen
Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper
children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery
factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was
exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout
history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable
alternative. The surviving facts... strongly suggest that whether work
was organized along factory lines was in Roman times determined, not by
technological considerations, but by the relative power of the two producing
classes. Freedmen and citizens had sufficient power to maintain a guild
organization. Slaves had no power--and ended up in factories ["What Do
Bosses Do?"]. The problem with the old "putting out" system, in which cottage
workers produced textiles on a contractual basis, was that it only eliminated
worker control of the product. The factory system, by eliminating worker
control of the production process, had the advantage of discipline and
supervision, with workers organized under an overseer. the origin and success
of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution
of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the
quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how
much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods,
to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much
of a choice. Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division
of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency
resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and
sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time.
This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating
the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing
out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then
cutting it, etc.). without specialization, the capitalist had no essential
role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself
integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product,
he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for
pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly
and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from
mediating between the producer and the market. This principle is at the
center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred
years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale,
capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate
productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen
technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into
the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological
grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the
workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical
system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required
"peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman"
and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may
superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the
principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick,
David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent
body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker
self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and
absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned
out of fear of loss of control. Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's
America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:
The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated
his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production....
The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical
consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge
came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up
production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage
of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel
took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole [pp. xi-xii].
The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor
system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly
what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when
rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radicalized
working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that
the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls
over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds
referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home
Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice
but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... conspicuously
as a helot population [Town Labourer 72]." ... in the light of the Home
Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed
any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized
no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working
men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's
liberties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working
class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or disturbing character.
They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against
any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen,
or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable [Ibid.
80]. Peel's "bobbies"--professional law enforcement--replaced the posse
comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population
of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other
disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward
Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected."
At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering
the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the
manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter
of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military
occupation." [Ibid. 91-92]. Pitt's police state was supplemented by quasi-private
vigilantism, in the time-honored tradition of blackshirts and death squads
ever since. For example the "Association for the Protection of Property
against Republicans and Levellers"--an anti-Jacobin association of gentry
and mill-owners conducted house-to-house searches and organized Guy Fawkes-style
effigy burnings against Paine; "Church and King" mobs terrorised suspected
radicals [Chapter Five, "Planting the Liberty Tree," in Thompson]. Thompson
characterized this system of control as "political and social apartheid,"
and argued that "the revolution which did not happen in England was fully
as devastating" as the one that did happen in France [pp. 197-198]. Finally,
the state aided the growth of manufactures through mercantilism. Modern
exponents of the "free market" generally treat mercantilism as a "misguided"
attempt to promote some unified national interest, adopted out of sincere
ignorance of economic principles. In fact, the architects of mercantilism
knew exactly what they were doing. Mercantilism was extremetly efficient
for its real purpose: making wealthy manufacturing interests rich at the
expense of everyone else. Adam Smith consistently attacked mercantilism,
not as a product of economic error, but as a quite intelligent attempt
by powerful interests to enrich themselves through the coercive power of
the state. British manufacturing was created by state intervention to shut
out foreign goods, give British shipping a monopoly of foreign commerce,
and stamp out foreign competition by force. As an example of the latter,
British authorities in India destroyed the Bengalese textile industry,
makers of the highest quality fabric in the world. Although they had not
adopted steam-driven methods of production, there is a real possibility
that they would have done so, had India remained politically and economically
independent. The once

prosperous territory of
Bengal is today occupied by Bangladesh and the Calcutta area [Chomsky,
World Orders Old and New]. The American, German and Japanese industrial
systems were created by the same mercantilist policies, with massive tariffs
on industrial goods. "Free trade" was adopted by safely established industrial
powers, who used "laissez-faire" as an ideological weapon to prevent potential
rivals from following the same path of industrialization. Capitalism has
never been established by means of the free market, or even by the primary
action of the bourgeoisie. It has always been established by a revolution
from above, imposed by a pre-capitalist ruling class. In England, it was
the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon II's bureaucracy; in Germany,
the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a
"natural" bourgeois evolution, industrialization was carried out by a mercantilist
aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords [Harrington,
Twilight of Capitalism]. Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc
described the process in the high middle ages by which serfdom had gradually
withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto
freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating
and being replaced by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one.
Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been "a
system of relatively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out
the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures." By 1650
the trend had been reversed, and there was "a reasonably high level of
continuity between the families that had been high strata" in 1450 and
1650. Capitalism, far from being "the overthrow of a backward aristocracy
by a progressive bourgeoisie," "was brought into existence by a landed
aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old
system was disintegrating." [Historical Capitalism 41-42, 105-106]. This
is echoed in part by Arno Mayer [The Persistence of the Old Regime], who
argued for continuity between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist
ruling class. The process by which the high medieval civilization of peasant
proprietors, craft guilds and free cities was overthrown, was vividly described
by Kropotkin [Mutual Aid 225]. Before the invention of gunpowder, the free
cities repelled royal armies more often than not, and won their independence
from feudal dues. And these cities often made common cause with peasants
in their struggles to control the land. The absolutist state and the capitalist
revolution it imposed became possible only when artillery could reduce
fortified cities with a high degree of efficiency, and the king could make
war on his own people. And in the aftermath of this conquest, the Europe
of William Morris was left devastated, depopulated, and miserable. Peter
Tosh had a song called "Four Hundred Years." Although the white working
class has suffered nothing like the brutality of black slavery, there has
nevertheless been a "four hundred years" of oppression for all of us under
the system of state capitalism established in the seventeenth century.
Ever since the birth of the first states six thousand years ago, political
coercion has allowed one ruling class or another to live off other people's
labor. But since the seventeenth century the system of power has become
increasingly conscious, unified, and global in scale. The current system
of transnational state capitalism, without rival since the collapse of
the soviet bureaucratic class system, is a direct outgrowth of the seizure
of power "four hundred years" ago. Orwell had it backwards. The past is
a "boot smashing a human face." Whether the future is more of the same
depends on what we do now. IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY Ideological hegemony is
the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual
framework provided to them by their exploiters. It acts first of all to
conceal class conflict and exploitation behind a smokescreen of "national
unity" or "general welfare." Those who point to the role of the state as
guarantor of class privilege are denounced, in theatrical tones of moral
outrage, for "class warfare." If anyone is so unpardonably "extremist"
as to describe the massive foundation of state intervention and subsidy
upon which corporate capitalism rests, he is sure to be rebuked for "Marxist
class war rhetoric" (Bob Novak), or "robber baron rhetoric" (Treasury Secretary
O'Neill). The ideological framework of "national unity" is taken to the
point that "this country," "society," or "our system of government" is
set up as an object of gratitude for "the freedoms we enjoy." Only the
most unpatriotic notice that our liberties, far from being granted to us
by a generous and benevolent government, were won by past resistance against
the state. Charters and bills of rights were not grants from the state,
but were forced on the state from below. If our liberties belong to us
by right of birth, as a moral fact of nature, it follows that we owe the
state no debt of gratitude for not violating them, any more than we owe
our thanks to another individual for refraining from robbing or killing
us. Simple logic implies that, rather than being grateful to "the freest
country on earth," we should raise hell every time it infringes on our
liberty. After all, that's how we got our liberty in the first place. When
another individual puts his hand in our pocket to enrich himself at our
expense, our natural instinct is to resist. But thanks to patriotism, the
ruling class is able to transform their hand in our pocket into "society"
or "our country." The religion of national unity is most pathological in
regard to "defense" and foreign policy. The manufacture of foreign crisis
and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress
threats to class rule. The crooked politicians may work for the "special
interests" domestically, but when those same politicians engineer a war
it is a matter of loyalty to "our country." The Chairman of the JCS, in
discussing the "defense" posture, will refer with a straight face to "national
security threats" faced by the U. S., and describe the armed forces of
some official enemy like China as far beyond "legitimate defensive requirements."
The quickest way to put oneself beyond the pale is to point out that all
these "threats" involve what some country on the other side of the world
is doing within a hundred miles of its own border. Another offense against
fatherland worship is to judge the actions of the United States, in its
global operations to keep the Third World safe for ITT and United Fruit
Company, by the same standard of "legitimate defensive requirements" applied
to China. In the official ideology, America's wars by definition are always
fought "for our liberties," to "defend our country," or in the smarmy world
of Maudlin Albright, a selfless desire to promote "peace and freedom" in
the world. To suggest that the -real defenders of our liberties took up
arms against the government, or that the national security state is a greater
threat to our liberties than any foreign enemy we have ever faced, is unforgiveable.
Above all, good Americans don't notice all those military advisers teaching
death squads how to hack off the faces of union organizers and leave them
in ditches, or to properly use pliers on a dissident's testicles. War crimes
are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945,
unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.)
After a century and a half of patriotic indoctrination by the statist education
system, Americans have thoroughly internalized the "little red schoolhouse"
version of American history. This authoritarian piety is so diametrically
opposed to the beliefs of those who took up arms in the Revolution that
the citizenry has largely forgotten what it means to be American. In fact,
the authentic principles of Americanism have been stood on their head.
Two hundred years ago, standing armies were feared as a threat to liberty
and a breeding ground for authoritarian personalities; conscription was
associated with the tyranny of Cromwell; wage labor was thought to be inconsistent
with the independent spirit of a free citizen. Today, two hundred years
later, Americans have been so Prussianized by sixty years of a garrison
state and "wars" against one internal enemy or another, that they are conditioned
to genuflect at the sight of a uniform. Draft dodgers are equivalent to
child molesters. Most people work for some centralized corporate or state
bureaucracy, where as a matter of course they are expected to obey orders
from superiors, work under constant surveillance, and even piss in a cup
on command. During wartime, it becomes unpatriotic to criticize or question
the government and dissent is identified with disloyalty. Absolute faith
and obedience to authority is a litmus test of "Americanism." Foreign war
is a very useful tool for manipulating the popular mind and keeping the
domestic population under control. War is the easiest way to shift vast,
unaccountable new powers to the State. People are most uncritically obedient
at the very time they need to be most vigilant. The greatest irony is that,
in a country founded by revolution, "Americanism" is defined as respecting
authority and resisting "subversion." The Revolution was a revolution indeed,
in which the domestic political institutions of the colonies were forcibly
overthrown. It was, in many times and places, a civil war between classes.
But as Voltairine de Cleyre wrote a century ago in "Anarchism and American
Traditions," the version in the history books is a patriotic conflict between
our "Founding Fathers" and a foreign enemy. Those who can still quote Jefferson
on the right of revolution are relegated to the "extremist" fringe, to
be rounded up in the next war hysteria or red scare. This ideological construct
of a unified "national interest" includes the fiction of a "neutral" set
of laws, which conceals the exploitative nature of the system of power
we live under. Under corporate capitalism the relationships of exploitation
are mediated by the political system to an extent unknown under previous
class systems. Under chattel slavery and feudalism, exploitation was concrete
and personalized in the producer's relationship with his master. The slave
and peasant knew exactly who was screwing them. The modern worker, on the
other hand, feels a painful pounding sensation, but has only a vague idea
where it is coming from. Besides its function of masking the ruling class
interests behind a facade of "general welfare," ideological hegemony also
manufactures divisions between the ruled. Through campaigns against "welfare
cheats" and "deadbeats," and demands to "get tough on crime," the ruling
class is able to channel the hostility of the middle and working classes
against the underclass. Especially nauseating is the phenomenon of "billionaire
populism." Calls for bankruptcy and welfare "reform," and for wars on crime,
are dressed up in pseudo-populist rhetoric, identifying the underclass
as the chief parasites who feed off the producers' labor. In their "aw,
shucks" symbolic universe, you'd think America was a Readers Digest/Norman
Rockwell world with nothing but hard-working small businessmen and family
farmers, on the one hand, and welfare cheats, deadbeats, union bosses and
bureaucrats on the other. From listening to them, you'd never suspect that
multi-billionaires or global corporations even exist, let alone that they
might stand to benefit from such "populism." In the real world, corporations
are the biggest clients of the welfare state, the biggest bankruptcies
are corporate chapter eleven filings, and the worst crimes are committed
in corporate suites rather than on the streets. The real robbery of the
average producer consists of profit and usury, extorted only with the help
of the state--the real "big government" on our backs. But as long as the
working class and the underclass are busy fighting each other, they won't
notice who is really robbing them. "The oppressor's most powerful weapon
is the mind of the oppressed." THE MONEY MONOPOLY In every system of class
exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production
in order to extract tribute from labor. Under capitalism, access to capital
is restricted by the money monopoly, by which the state or banking system
is given a monopoly on the medium of exchange, and alternative media of
exchange are prohibited. The money monopoly also includes entry barriers
against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of
banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest
rates are kept artificially high. Just in passing, we might mention the
monumental hypocricy of the regulation of credit unions in the United States,
which require that their membership must share some common bond, like working
for the same employer. Imagine the outrage if IGA and Safeway lobbied for
a national law to prohibit grocery co-ops unless the members all worked
for the same company! One of the most notable supporters of these laws
is Phil Gramm, that renowned "free marketeer" and economics professor--and
foremost among the banking industry's whores in Congress. Individualist
and mutualist anarchists like William Greene [Mutual Banking], Benjamin
Tucker [Instead of a Book), and J. B. Robertson [The Economics of Liberty]
viewed the money monopoly as central to the capitalist system of privilege.
In a genuinely free banking market, any group of individuals could form
a mutual bank and issue monetized credit in the form of bank notes against
any form of collateral they chose, with acceptance of these notes as tender
being a condition of membership. Greene speculated that a mutual bank might
choose to honor not only marketable property as collateral, but the "pledging
... [of] future production." [p. 73]. The result would be a reduction in
interest rates, through competition, to the cost of administrative overhead--less
than one percent. Abundant cheap credit would drastically alter the balance
of power between capital and labor, and returns on labor would replace
returns on capital as the dominant form of economic activity. According
to Robinson, Upon the monopoly rate of interest for money that is... forced
upon us by law, is based the whole system of interest upon capital, that
permeates all modern business. With free banking, interest upon bonds of
all kinds and dividends upon stock would fall to the minimum bank interest
charge. The so-called rent of houses... would fall to the cost of maintenance
and replacement. All that part of the product which is now taken by interest
would belong to the producer. Capital, however... defined, would practically
cease to exist as an income producing fund, for the simple reason that
if money, wherewith to buy capital, could be obtained for one-half of one
per cent, capital itself could command no higher price [pp. 80-81]. And
the result would be a drastically improved bargaining position for tenants
and workers against the owners of land and capital. According to Gary Elkin,
Tucker's free market anarchism carried certain inherent libertarian socialist
implications: It's important to note that because of Tucker's proposal
to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit,
his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers'
control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were
to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed
it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy,
and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively. The banking
monopoly was not only the "lynchpin of capitalism," but also the seed from
which the landlord's monopoly grew. Without a money monopoly, the price
of land would be much lower, and promote "the process of reducing rents
toward zero." [Gary Elkin, "Benjamin Tucker--Anarchist or Capitalist"].
Given the worker's improved bargaining position, "capitalists' ability
to extract surplus value from the labor of employees would be eliminated
or at least greatly reduced." [Gary Elkin, Mutual Banking]. As compensation
for labor approached value-added, returns on capital were driven down by
market competition, and the value of corporate stock consequently plummeted,
the worker would become a de facto co-owner of his workplace, even if the
company remained nominally stockholder-owned. Near-zero interest rates
would increase the independence of labor in all sorts of interesting ways.
For one thing, anyone with a twenty-year mortgage at 8% now could, in the
absence of usury, pay it off in ten years. Most people in their 30S would
have their houses paid off. Between this and the nonexistence of high-interest
credit card debt, two of the greatest sources of anxiety to keep one's
job at any cost would disappear. In addition, many workers would have large
savings ("go to hell money"). Significant numbers would retire in their
forties or fifties, cut back to part-time, or start businesses; with jobs
competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary.
Our hypothetical world of free credit in many ways resembles the situation
in colonial societies. E. G. Wakefield, in View of the Art of Colonization,
wrote of the unacceptably weak position of the employing class when self-employment
with one's own property was readily available. In colonies, there was a
tight labor market and poor labor discipline because of the abundance of
cheap land. "Not only does the degree of exploitation of the wage-labourer
remain indecently low. The wage-labourer loses into the bargain, along
with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the
abstemious capitalist." Where land is cheap and all men are free, where
every one who so pleases can obtain a piece of land for himself, not only
is labour very dear, as respects the labourers' share of the product, but
the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price. This environment
also prevented the concentration of wealth, as Wakefield commented: "Few,
even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses
of wealth." As a result, colonial elites petitioned the mother country
for imported labor and for restrictions on land for settlement. According
to Wakefield's disciple Herman Merivale, there was an "urgent desire for
cheaper and more subservient labourers--for a class to whom the capitalist
might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them." [Maurice Dobb,
Studies in the Development of Capitalism; Marx, Chapter 33: "The New Theory
of Colonialism," in Capital Vol. 1]. In addition to all this, central banking
systems perform additional service to the interests of capital. First of
all, the chief requirement of finance capitalists is to avoid inflation,
in order to allow predictable returns on investment. This is ostensibly
the primary purpose of the Federal Reserve and other central banks. But
at least as important is the role of the central banks in promoting what
they consider a "natural" level of unemployment--until the 1990s around
six per cent. The reason is that when unemployment goes much below this
figure, labor becomes increasingly uppity and presses for better pay and
working conditions and more autonomy. Workers are willing to take a lot
less crap off the boss when they know they can find a job at least as good
the next day. On the other hand, nothing is so effective in "getting your
mind right" as the knowledge that people are lined up to take your job.
The Clinton "prosperity" is a seeming exception to this principle. As unemployment
threatened to drop below the four per cent mark, some members of the Federal
Reserve agitated to raise interest rates and take off the "inflationary"
pressure by throwing a few million workers on the street. But as Greenspan
[Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan] testified before the Senate Banking
Committee, the situation was unique. Given the degree of job insecurity
in the high-tech economy, there was "[a]typical restraint on compensation
increases." In 1996, even with a tight labor market, 46% of workers at
large firms were fearful of layoffs--compared to only 25% in 1991, when
unemplojment was much higher. The reluctance of workers to leave their
jobs to seek other employment as the labor market tightened has provided
further evidence of such concern, as has the tendency toward longer labor
union contracts. For many decades, contracts rarely exceeded three years.
Today, one can point to five and six-year contracts--contracts that are
commonly characterized by an emphasis on job security and that involve
only modest wage increases. The low level of work stoppages of recent years
also attests to concern about job security. Thus the willingness of workers
in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job
security seems to be reasonably well documented. For the bosses, the high-tech
economy is the next best thing to high unemployment for keeping our minds
right. "Fighting inflation" translates operationally to increasing job
insecurity and making workers less likely to strike or to look for new
jobs. PATENTS The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to
promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a
monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It
is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be
without it. Right-libertarian Murray Rothbard considered patents a fundamental
violation of free market principles. The man who has not bought a machine
and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free
market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent
a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and
he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from
the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly
privilege by the State and are invasions of property rights on the market.
[Man, Economy, and State vol. 2 p. 655] Patents make an astronomical price
difference. Until the early 1970s, for example, Italy did not recognize
drug patents. As a result, Roche Products charged the British national
health a price over 40 times greater for patented components of Librium
and Valium than charged by competitors in Italy [Raghavan, Recolonization
p. 124]. Patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. Chakravarthi
Raghavan pointed out that research scientists who actually do the work
of inventing are required to sign over patent rights as a condition of
employment, while patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing
of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented
inventions. [op. cit. p. 118] Rothbard likewise argued that patents eliminate
"the competitive spur for further research" because incremental innovation
based on others' patents is prohibited, and because the holder can "rest
on his laurels for the entire period of the patent," with no fear of a
competitor improving his invention." And they hamper technical progress
because "mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than
individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all
the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact."
[op. cit. pp. 655, 658-659]. The intellectual property regime under the
Uruguay Round of GATT goes far beyond traditional patent law in suppressing
innovation. One benefit of traditional patent law, at least, was that it
required an invention under patent to be published. Under U.S. pressure,
however, "trade secrets" were included in GATT. As a result, governments
will be required to help suppress information not formally protected by
patents [Raghavan, op. cit. p. 122]. And patents are not necessary as an
incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is rewarded by
the competitive advantage accruing to the first developer of an idea. This
is borne out by F. M. Scherer's testimony before the FTC in 1995 [Hearings
on Global and Innovation-Based Competition]. Scherer spoke of a survey
of 91 companies in which only seven "accorded high significance to patent
protection as a factor in their R & D investments." Most of them described
patents as "the least important of considerations." Most companies considered
their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be "the necessity of remaining
competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand
and diversify their sales." In another study, Scherer found no negative
effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents.
A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed
without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products,
and textiles, the figure was 100%. The one exception was drugs, in which
60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness
on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies
get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government,
and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government
expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation
advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example
in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was
found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents.
Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain
a 30% market share and to charge premium prices. The injustice of patent
monopolies is exacerbated by government funding of research and innovation,
with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it didn't
spend a penny to develop. In 1999, extending the research and experimentation
tax credit was, along with extensions of a number of other corporate tax
preferences, considered the most urgent business of the Congressional leadership.
Hastert, when asked if any elements of the tax bill were essential, said:
"I think the [tax preference] extenders are something we're going to have
to work on. Ways and Means Chair Bill Archer added, "before the year is
out... we will do the extenders in a very stripped down bill that doesn't
include anything else." A five-year extension of the research and experimentation
credit (retroactive to 1 July 1999) was expected to cost $13.1 billion.
(That credit makes the effective tax rate on R & D spending less than
zero.) [Citizens for Tax Justice, GOP Leaders Distill Essence of Tax Plan].
The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amendments,
allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government
R & D money--and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost
of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money and
in the public domain since 1964. The patent was given away to Burroughs
Wellcome Corp. [Chris Lewis, "Public Assets, Private Profits]. As if the
deck were not sufficiently stacked already, the pharmaceutical companies
in 1999 actually lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years
by a special act of private law [Benjamin Grove, "Gibbons backs drug-monopoly
bill"]. Patents have been used throughout the twentieth century "to circumvent
antitrutst laws," according to David Noble. They were "bought up in large
numbers to suppress competition," which also resulted in "the suppression
of invention itself." [America by Design, pp. 84-109]. Edwin Prindle, a
corporate patent lawyer, wrote in 1906: Patents are the best and most effective
means of controlling competition. They occasionally give absolute command
of the market, enabling their owner to name the price without regard to
the cost of production.... Patents are the only legal form of absolute
monopoly [America by Design p. 90]. Patents played a key role in the formation
of the electrical appliance, communications, and chemical industries. G.
E. and Westinghouse expanded to dominate the electrical manufacturing market
at the turn of the century largely through patent control. In 1906 they
curtailed the patent litigation between them by pooling their patents.
AT&T also expanded "primarily through strategies of patent monopoly."
The American chemical industry was marginal until 1917, when Attorney-General
Mitchell Palmer seized German patents and distributed them among the major
American chemical companies. DuPont got licenses on 300 of the 735 patents
[America by Design pp. 10, 16]. Patents are also being used on a global
scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly
of productive technology. The single most totalitarian provision of the
Uruguay Round is probably its "intellectual property" provisions. GATT
has extended both the scope and duration of patents far beyond anything
ever envisioned in original patent law. In England, patents were originally
for fourteen years--the time needed to train two journeymen in succession
(and by analogy, the time necessary to go into production and reap the
initial profit for originality). By that standard, given the shorter training
times required today, and the shorter lifespan of technology, the period
of monopoly should be shorter. Instead, the U.S. seeks to extend them to
fifty years [Raghavan, Recolonization pp. 119-120]. According to Martin
Khor Kok Peng, the U.S. is by far the most absolutist of the participants
in the Uruguay Round. Unlike the European Community, it would require patent
protection for plant and animal varieties, and for biological processes
for animal and plant protection [The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty
p. 28]. The provisions for biotech are really a way of increasing trade
barriers, and forcing consumers to subsidize the TNCs engaged in agribusiness.
The U.S. seeks to apply patents to genetically-modified organisms, effectively
pirating the work of generations of Third World breeders by isolating beneficial
genes in traditonal varieties and incorporating them in new GMOs--and maybe
even enforcing patent rights against the traditional variety which was
the source of the genetic material. For example Monsanto has attempted
to use the presence of their DNA in a crop as prima facie evidence of pirating--when
it is much more likely that their variety cross-pollinated and contaminated
the farmer's crop against his will. The Pinkerton agency, by the way, plays
a leading role in investigating such charges--that's right, the same folks
who have been breaking strikes and kicking organizers down stairs for the
past century. Even jack-booted thugs have to diversify to make it in the
global economy. The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect
industries relying on or producing "generic technologies," and to restrict
diffusion of "dual use" technologies. The U. S.-Japanese trade agreement
on semi-conductors, for example, is a "cartel-like, 'managed trade' agreement."
So much for "free trade." [Dieter Ernst, "Technology, Economic Security
and Latecomer Idustrialization," in Raghavan Pp. 39-40]. Patent law traditionally
required a holder to work the invention in a country in order to receive
patent protection. U.K. law allowed compulsory licensing after three years
if an invention was not being worked, or being worked fully, and demand
was being met "to a substantial extent" by importation; or where the export
market was not being supplied because of the patentee's refusal to grant
licenses on reasonable terms [Raghavan pp. 120, 138]. The central motivation
in the GATT intellectual property regime, however, is to permanently lock
in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent
independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would,
as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, "effectively prevent the diffusion of technology
to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties
of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential development of Third World technology."
Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of
patents granted in the 1970s by Third World countries, 84% were foreign-owned.
But fewer than 5% of foreign-owned patents were actually used in production.
As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to
use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it [op. cit. pp. 29-30].
Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World: Given the vast
outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of
some of these products, the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent
emergence of competition by controlling... the flows of technology to others.
The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies
for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise
of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third
World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries
of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of
assured rentier income [op. cit. p. 96]. Corporate propagandists piously
denounce anti-globalists as enemies of the Third World, seeking to use
trade barriers to maintain an affluent Western lifestyle at the expense
of the poor nations. The above measures--trade barriers--to permanently
suppress Third World technology and keep the South as a big sweatshop,
give the lie to this "humanitarian" concern. This is not a case of differing
opinions, or of sincerely mistaken understanding of the facts. Setting
aside false subtleties, what we see here is pure evil at work--Orwell's
"boot stamping on a human face forever." If any architects of this policy
believe it to be for general human well-being, it only shows the capacity
of ideology to justify the oppressor to himself and enable him to sleep
at night. Infrastructure. Spending on transportation and communications
networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows
big business to "externalize its costs" on the public, and conceal its
true operating expenses. Chomsky described this state capitalist underwriting
of shipping costs quite accurately: One well-known fact about trade is
that it's highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors.... The
most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized.... Since
trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the
calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to
reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and
all sorts of market-distorting functions ["How Free is the Free Market?"].
Every wave of concentration of capital has followed a publicly subsidized
infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built
largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed
by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance. The next
major infrastructure projects were the national highway system, starting
with the system of designated national highways in the 1920s and culminating
with Eisenhower's interstate system; and the civil aviation system, built
almost entirely with federal money. The result was massive concentration
in retail, agriculture, and food processing. The third such project was
the infrastructure of the worldwide web, originally built by the Pentagon.
It permits, for the first time, direction of global operations in real
time from a single corporate headquarters, and is accelerating the concentration
of capital on a global scale. To quote Chomsky again, "The telecommunications
revolution... is... another state component of the international economy
that didn't develop through private capital, but through the public paying
to destroy themselves...." [Class Warfare p. 40]. The centralized corporate
economy depends for its existence on a shipping price system which is artificially
distorted by government intervention. To fully grasp how dependent the
corporate economy is on socializing transportation and communications costs,
imagine what would happen if truck and aircraft fuel were taxed enough
to pay the full cost of maintenance and new building costs on highways
and airports; and if fossil fuels depletion allowances were removed. The
result would be a massive increase in shipping costs. Does anyone seriously
believe that Wal-Mart could continue to undersell local retailers, or corporate
agribusiness could destroy the family farm? Intellectually honest right
libertarians freely admit as much. For example, Tiber Machan wrote in The
Freeman that Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against
eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints
on construction. Of course--but what's so wrong with that? Perhaps the
worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political
authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate
the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to
obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede
what most environmentalists see as rampant--indeed reckless--industrialization.
The system of private property rights--in which... all... kinds of... human
activity must be conducted within one's own realm except where cooperation
from others has been gained voluntarily--is the greatest moderator of human
aspirations.... In short, people may reach goals they aren't able to reach
with their own resources only by convincing others, through arguments and
fair exchanges, to cooperate ["On Airports and Individual Rights"]. The
logjams and bottlenecks in the transportation system are an inevitable
result of subsidies. Those who debate the reason for planes stacked up
at O'Hare airport, or decry the fact that highways and bridges are deteriorating
several times faster than repairs are being budgeted, need only read an
economics 101 text. Market prices are signals that relate supply to demand.
When subsidies distort these signals, the consumer does not perceive the
real cost of producing the goods he consumes. The "feedback loop" is broken,
and demands on the system overwhelm it beyond its ability to respond. When
people don't have to pay the real cost of something they consume, they
aren't very careful about only using what they need. It is interesting
that every major antitrust action in this century has involved either some
basic energy resource, or some form of infrastructure, on which the overall
economy depends. Standard Oil, AT&T, and Microsoft were all cases in
which monopoly price gouging was a danger to the economy as a whole. This
brings to mind Engels' observation that advanced capitalism would reach
a stage where the state--"the official representative of capitalist society"--would
have to convert "the great institutions for intercourse and communication"
into state property. Engels did not foresee the use of antitrust actions
to achieve the same end [Anti-Duhring]. "MILITARY KEYNESIANISM" The leading
sectors of the economy, including cybernetics, communications, and military
industry, have their sales and profits virtually guaranteed by the state.
The entire manufacturing sector, as a whole, was permanently expanded beyond
recognition by an infusion of federal money during World War II. In 1939
the entire manufacturing plant of the U.S. was valued at $40 billion. By
1945, another $26 billion worth of plant and equipment had been built,
"two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds." The top 250
corporations in 1939 owned 65% of plant and equipment, but during the war
operated 79% of all new facilities built with government funds [Mills,
The Power Elite P. 101]. Machine tools were vastly expanded by the war.
In 1940, 23% of machine tools in use were less than 10 years old. By 1945,
the figure had grown to 62%. The industry contracted rapidly after 1945,
and would probably have gone into a depression, had it not returned to
wartime levels of output during Korea and remained that way throughout
the Cold War. The R & D complex, likewise, was a creation of the war.
Between 1939 and 1945, the share of AT&T research expenditures made
up of government contracts expanded from 1% to 83%. Over 90% of the patents
resulting from government-funded wartime research were given away to industry.
The modern electronics industry was largely a product of World War II and
Cold War spending (e.g., miniaturization of circuits for bomb proximity
fuses, high capacity computers for command and control, etc.) [Noble, Forces
of Production pp. 8-16]. The jumbo jet industry would never have come about
without continuous Cold War levels of military spending. The machine tools
needed for producing large aircraft were so complex and expensive that
no "small peacetime orders" would have provided a sufficient production
run to pay for them. Without large military orders, they would simply not
have existed. The aircraft industry quickly spiraled into red ink after
1945, and was near bankruptcy at the beginning of the 1948 war scare, after
which Truman restored it to life with massive spending. By 1964, 90% of
aerospace R & D was funded by the government, with massive spillover
into the electronics, machine tool, and other industries [Noble, Forces
of Production pp. 6-7; Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948].
OTHER SUBSIDIES Infrastructure and military spending are not the only examples
of the process by which cost and risk are socialized, and profit is privatized--or,
as Rothbard put it, by which "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing
power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs."
["Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"]. Some of these government assumptions
of risk and cost are ad hoc and targeted toward specific industries. Among
the greatest beneficiaries of such underwriting are electrical utilities.
Close to 100% of all research and development for nuclear power is either
performed by the government itself, in its military reactor program, or
by lump-sum R & D grants; the government waives use-charges for nuclear
fuels, subsidizes uranium production, provides access to government land
below market price (and builds hundreds of miles of access roads at taxpayer
expense), enriches uranium, and disposes of waste at sweetheart prices.
The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limited the liability of the nuclear power
industry, and assumed government liability above that level [Adams and
Brock pp. 279-281]. A Westinghouse official admitted in 1953, If you were
to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money..,
we would have to say "No." The cost of the plant would be a question mark
until after we built it and, by that sole means, found out the answer.
We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done
all the work and operated successfully.... This is still a situation of
pyramiding uncertainties.... There is a distinction between risk-taking
and recklessness [Ibid. pp. 278-279]. So much for profit as a reward for
the entrepreneur's risk. These "entrepreneurs" make their profits in the
same way as a seventeenth-century courtier, by obtaining the favor of the
king. To quote Chomsky, the sectors of the economy that remain competitive
are those that feed from the public trough.... The glories of Free Enterprise
provide a useful weapon against government policies that might benefit
the general population.... But the rich and powerful... have long appreciated
the need to protect themselves from the destructive forces of free-market
capitalism, which may provide suitable themes for rousing oratory, but
only so long as the public handout and the regulatory and protectionist
apparatus are secure, and state power is on call when needed (Chomsky,
Deterring Democracy p. 144]. Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of Archer Daniels
Midland, admitted that "[t]here is not one grain of anything in the world
that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free
market is in the speeches of politicians." [Don Carney, "Dwayne's World"].
Big business also enjoys financial support through the tax code. It is
likely that most of the Fortune 500 would go bankrupt without corporate
welfare. Direct federal tax breaks to business in 1996 were close to $350
billion [Based on my crunching on numbers in Zepezauer and Naiman, Take
the Rich Off Welfare]. This figure, for federal corporate welfare alone,
is over two-thirds of annual corporate profits for 1996 ($460 billion)
[Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996]. Estimates of state and
local tax breaks is fairly impressionistic, since they vary not only with
each critic's subjective definition of "corporate welfare," but involve
the tax codes of fifty states and the public records of thousands of municipalities.
Besides money pimps in the state and local governments are embarassed by
the sweet deals they give their corporate johns. In my own state of Arkansas,
the incorruptible Baptist preacher who serves as governor opposed a bill
to require quarterly public reports from the Department of Economic Development
on its special tax breaks to businesses. "[K]eeping incentive records from
public scrutiny is important in attracting business," and releasing "proprietary
information" could have a "chilling effect." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
3 Feb. 2001]. But state and local corporate welfare could easily amount
to a figure comparable to federal. Taken as a whole, direct tax breaks
to business at all levels of government are probably on the same order
of magnitude as corporate profits. And this understates the effect of corporate
welfare, since it disproportionately goes to a handful of giant firms in
each industry. For example, accelerated depreciation favors expansion by
existing firms. New firms find it of little benefit, since they are likely
to lose money their first few years. An established firm, however, can
run a loss in a new venture and charge the accelerated depreciation against
its profits on old facilities [Baratz, "Corporate Giants and the Power
Structure"]. The most outrageous of these tax expenditures is the subsidy
to the actual financial transactions by which capital is concentrated.
The interest deduction on corporate debt, most of which was run up on leveraged
buyouts and acquisitions, costs the treasury over $200 billion a year [Zepezauer
p. 122-123]. Without this deduction, the wave of mergers in the 1980s,
or the megamergers of the 1990s, could never have taken place. On top of
everything else, this acts as a massive direct subsidy to banking, increasing
the power of finance capital in the corporate economy to a level greater
than it has been since the Age of Morgan. A closely related subsidy is
the exemption from capital gains of securities transactions involved in
corporate mergers (i.e. "stock swaps")--even though premiums are usually
paid well over the market value of the stock [Green p. 11]. The 1986 tax
reform included a provision which prevented corporations from deducting
fees for investment 'banks and advisers involved in leveraged buyouts.
The 1996 minimum wage increase repealed this provision, with one exception:
interest deductions were removed for employee buyouts [Judis, "Bare Minimum"].
Right libertarians like Rothbard object to classifying tax expenditures
as subsidies. It presumes that tax money rightfully belongs to the government,
when in fact the government is only letting them keep what is rightfully
theirs. The tax code is indeed unfair, but the solution is to eliminate
the taxes for everyone, not to level the code up [Rothbard, Power and Market
p. 104]. This is a very shaky argument. Supporters of tax code reform in
the 1980s insisted that the sole legitimate purpose of taxation was to
raise revenue, not to provide carrots and sticks for social engineering
purposes. And, semantic quibbling aside, the current tax system would be
exactly the same if we started out with zero tax rates and then imposed
a punitive tax only on those not engaged in favored activities. Either
way, the uneven tax policy gives a competitive advantage to privileged
industries. POLITICAL REPRESSION In times of unusual popular consciousness
and mobilization, when the capitalist system faces grave political threats,
the state resorts to repression until the danger is past. The major such
waves in this country--the Haymarket reaction, and the red scares after
the world wars--are recounted by Goldstein [Political Repression in Modern
America]. But the wave of repression which began in the 1970s, though less
intense, has been permanently institutionalized to a unique extent. Until
the late 1960s, elite perspective was governed by the New Deal social contract.
The corporate state would buy stability and popular acquiescence in imperialist
exploitation abroad by guaranteeing a level of prosperity and security
to the middle class. In return for higher wages, unions would enforce management
control of the workplace. But starting during the Vietnam era, the elite's
thinking underwent a profound change. They concluded from the 1960s experience
that the social contract had failed. In response to the antiwar protests
and race riots, LBJ and Nixon began to create an institutional framework
for martial law, to make sure that any such disorder in the future could
be dealt with differently. Johnson's operation GARDEN PLOT involved domestic
surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation
with local police in supressing disorder in all fifty states, plans for
mass preventive detention, and joint exercises of police and the regular
military [Morales, U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning]. Governor
Reagan and his National Guard chief Louis Giuffrida were enthusiastic supporters
of GARDEN PLOT exercises in California. Reagan was also a pioneer in creating
quasi-military SWAT teams, which now exist in every major town. The wave
of wildcat strikes in the early 1970s showed that organized labor could
no longer keep its part of the bargain, and that the social contract should
be reasessed. At the same time, the business press was flooded with articles
on the impending "capital shortage," and calls for shifting resources from
consumption to capital accumulation. They predicted frankly that a cap
on real wages would be hard to force on the public in the existing political
environment [Boyte, Backyard Revolution pp. 13-16]. This sentiment was
expressed by Huntington et al. in The Crisis of Democracy (a paper for
the Trilateral Institution--a good proxy for elite thinking); they argued
that the system was collapsing from demand overload, because of an excess
of democracy. Corporations embraced the full range of union-busting posibilities
in Taft-Hartley, risking only token fines from the NLRB. They drastically
increased management resources devoted to workplace surveillance and control,
a necessity because of discontent from stagnant wages and mounting workloads
[Fat and Mean]. Wages as a percentage of value added have declined drastically
since the 1970s; all increases in labor productivity have been channelled
into profit and investment, rather than wages. A new Cold War military
buildup further transferred public resources to industry. A series of events
like the fall of Saigon, the nonaligned movement, and the New International
Economic Order were taken as signs that the trans-national corporate empire
was losing control. Reagan's escalating intervention in Central America
was a partial response to this perception. But more importantly the Uruguay
Round of GATT snatched total victory from the jaws of defeat; it ended
all barriers to TNCs buying up entire economies, locked the west into monopoly
control of modern technology, and created a world government on behalf
of global corporations. In the meantime the U.S. was, in the words of Richard
K. Moore, importing techniques of social control from the imperial periphery
to the core area. With the help of the Drug War and the National Security
State, the apparatus of repression continued to grow. The Drug War has
turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper; civil forfeiture, with the
aid of jailhouse snitches, gives police the power to steal property without
ever filing charges--a lucrative source of funds for helicopters and kevlar
vests. SWAT teams have led to the militarization of local police forces,
and cross-training with the military has led many urban police departments
to view the local population as an occupied enemy [Weber, Warrior Cops].
Reagan's crony Giuffrida resurfaced as head of FEMA, where he worked with
Oliver North to fine-tune GARDEN PLOT. North, as the NSC liaison with FEMA
from 1982-84, developed a plan "to supend the constitution in the event
of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal
dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." [Chardy,
"Reagan Aides and the 'Secret' Government"]. GARDEN PLOT, interestingly,
was implemented during the Rodney King Riots and in recent anti-globalization
protests. Delta Force provided intelligence and advice in those places
and at Waco [Rosenberg, The Empire Strikes Back; Cockburn, The Jackboot
State]. Another innnovation is to turn everyone we deal with into a police
agent. Banks routinely report "suspicious" movements of cash; under "know
your customer" programs, retailers report purchases of items which can
conceivably be used in combination to manufacture drugs; libraries come
under pressure to report on readers of "subversive" material; DARE programs
turn kids into police informers. Computer technology has increased the
potential for surveillance to Orwellian levels. Pentium III processors
were revealed to embed identity codes in every document written on them.
Police forces are experimenting with combinations of public cameras, digital
face-recognition technology, and databases of digital photos. Image Data
LLC, a company in the process of buying digital drivers licence photos
from all fifty states, was exposed as a front for the Secret Service. CONCLUSION
It is almost too easy to bring back Bob Novak and Secretary O'Neill for
another kick--but I can't resist. "Marxist class warfare?" "Robber baron
rhetoric?" Well, the pages above recount the "class warfare" waged by the
robber barons themselves. If their kind tend to squeal like pigs when we
talk about class, it's because they've been stuck. But all the squealing
in the world won't change the facts. But what are the implications of the
above facts for our movement? It is commonly acknowledged that the manorial
economy was founded on force. Although you will never see the issue addressed
by Milton Friedman, intellectually honest right libertarians like Rothbard
acknowledge the role of the state in creating European feudalism and Amerian
slavery. Rothbard, drawing the obvious conclusion from this fact, acknowledged
the right of peasants or freed slaves to take over their "forty acres and
a mule" without compensation to the landlord. But we have seen that industrial
capitalism, to the same extent as manorialism or slavery, was founded on
force. Like its predecessors, capitalism could not have survived at any
point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures
at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell
their labor in a buyer's market, and protected the centers of economic
power from the dangers of the free market. To quote Benjamin Tucker again,
landlords and capitalists cannot extract surplus value from labor without
the help of the state. The modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is
the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past
stolen labor. By the same principles that Rothbard recognized in the agrarian
realm, the modern worker is justified in taking direct control of production,
and keeping the entire product of his labor. In a very real sense, every
subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply
put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example,
consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that
would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen
hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour
worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours
worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising
half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization,
is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs,
because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him
to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery. All these forms
of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept
the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels
of consumption with a work-week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said,
for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated
to produce a dollar he never received. Our survey also casts doubt on the
position of "anarchist" social democrat Noam Chomsky, who is notorious
for his distinction between "visions" and "goals." His long-term vision
is a decentralized society of self-governing communities and workplaces,
loosely federated together--the traditional anarchist vision. His immediate
goal, however, is to strengthen the regulatory state in order to break
up "private concentrations of power," before anarchism can be achieved.
But if , as we have seen, capitalism is dependent on the state to guarantee
it survival, it follows that it is sufficient to eliminate the statist
props to capitalism. In a letter of 4 September 1867, Engels aptly summed
up the difference between anarchists and state socialists: "They say 'abolish
the state and capital will go to the devil.' We propose the reverse." Exactly.
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